With Spring Training now upon us, and with lab-tested and science-approved psychic John Edward having predicted the imminent onset of predictions, many of our most luminous luminaries are gracing us with their MLB preseason picks. Over at ESPN, Buster Olney has picked the Tigers to win what he is calling the World Series. Over at The View, the ladies have predicted that David Wright will be dreamy. And in a less televised, more transcendental sphere, the Lord Buddha has surprised many Western prognosticators by picking the Houston Astros.

“Well, picked them for what?” the Westerner asks, somewhat predictably, and with a fistful of Freedom Fries jammed inelegantly in his mouth hole.

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Now that the Winter Olympics are behind us, and with them those boreal Danish cyborgs, those European blurs, those airborne American ice-o-nauts, those pawns of the alpine graviton, we can steer our Olympian spirit back to that lonely orphan of the Quadrennial Games, baseball. We the people, endowed with the Visa-commercial belief that we can achieve our dreams as long as we set our minds to it and also have parents who will drive us to the rink each morning at 4, can now seek ways to restore the American Pastime to this international event, the Pastime having been abruptly voted out some years ago when a bunch of Commie Pinkos got together with a bunch of wine-sipping art lovers to deny Americans their Gawd-given right to Americanize the rest of the world, and also to dominate it.

Granted, baseball got booted from the Summer Games, not the Winter, but since the Games of Ice ’N Snow are still fresh on our minds, and also since the Summer Games jilted Doubleday’s baby like a lottery winner divorces his wife, let’s work to return our game to Olympia’s embrace by making baseball part of the frozen fortnight, shall we? That’s right, fellow ’Murcans: Let’s make it a winter event!

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In my brief time here at NotGraphs – a time marked, incidentally, by writer unrest, failed coups d’editeur and overwhelming displays of Cistullian force – I have noticed a pair of salient things, “salient” being an old Latin word for “an old Latin word that slots directly before the American word ‘things.’” One is that humor writing, or, perhaps more accurately, alleged humor writing, is not nearly as fun as it seems, in part because The Paul Reiser Show took most of the good jokes but also because La Garde Cistullian – honestly, that’s what it’s called: The Cistullian Guard – allows us just one bathroom break per 18-hour workday and just three squares of an off-brand Slovenian toilet paper made primarily from corn husks and insect parts.

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As you’ve probably heard, Dodgers pitcher Clayton Kershaw recently signed a contract that will pay him more American dollars than you will earn across all the many lifetimes that Lord Buddha bestows upon you, even if you embezzle from your employers and/or diligently cut coupons.

As a result of his enviable windfall, the young lefty has been subject to a multitude of business proposals, probably. What follows is a not-at-all fictional record — or half-record, if you will — of just one of those.

There is the whir of the elliptical, the whine of the overhead fan.

Through the hum and drone comes a pulsing tone.

The young man picks up the cell phone and presses it to his ear.

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One thing we all have in common, apart from a deep and abiding desire to see Ben Bernanke wear a funny hat, is that each of us came into being without the benefit of a name, at least until such time that our guardians – or, in the case of Vlad the Impaler, our prophetic marketing executives – supplied us with the “nominal support” we’d eventually need while waiting for our vanilla lattes at Starbucks, because if there’s anything that creates havoc, it’s 26 patrons answering to “Hey, you.” What I’m saying is that somebody slapped a name on you, and unless you’re Vin Diesel – in which case Hi, Mr. Diesel! Love your work! – you still sign that name to birthday cards and death threats, which isn’t particularly smart because if you are anything like me, many of those threats are directed at Vlad the Impaler, who, though very much dead, actually answers to the name “Scooter.”

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It isn’t often that a big-league baseball player issues a statement of support on behalf of a fringe social movement, but that’s just what Johnny Peralta has done, perhaps unwittingly, with his recent and dare I say ballsy declaration that “I know I can play baseball naturally.”

As a volunteer moderator for several nudist websites – the fact of the matter is that except for the Cheetos crumbs and the Pepsi pop-tops, I’m completely nude right now – I can tell you that the naturist community is positively abuzz over Peralta’s announcement. (The naturist community is also kind of cold because, you know . . . winter.) At the naturist think tank Nudity Now! And Later!, associate fellow Louis “Swing Low” Johnson has penned a poetic paraphrase of Walt Whitman’s A Sun-Bath – Nakedness:

Never before did I get so close to Nature;
Never before did she come so close to me…
Except at the Rogers Center, obviously.

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Good news! MLB owners, umpires and the MLBPA have issued their formal approval of what you, the discriminating fan, have approved all along.

That’s right: They approve Instant Replay.

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This is the time of year – post-World Series, pre-pitchers ‘n catchers, circa happy hour – when baseball writers, gazing into the nullity of topics for which to engage their QWERTY, begin pulling baseball stories out of their respective badonkadonks. It’s also the time of year when baseball players “avoid arbitration.” This is a legal term meaning “evade arbitration.”

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It’s that time of year again, time when players of Major League Baseball announce via their Twitter machines, Instagramophones and hacked email accounts that, hey, no foolin’, they’re in the best darn shape of their lives.

Now, I’m no geometer, but it seems to me that apart from, say, “broad-shouldered and narrow-waisted, with forearms resembling the Lord God’s in Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam and with legs like those exclusive to Secretariat’s wet dreams,” one of the best shapes for a player to assume would be “round,” and by “round” I mean “perfectly round,” or, to put a finer point on it, though not too fine a point because then we’d be talking about the Cartesian coordinates and that would be pretty boring, “spherical,” because in all honesty, it would be funny to see the guy roll down the dugout steps.

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A curious reader might ask, “Hey, Answerman, do you have answers to my baseball-related questions?”

To which the Answerman might reply, “No. Why do you ask?”

Q: Tom Glavine’s wife, Christine, recently Tweeted a photo of her husband on the phone just as he was receiving news of his Hall of Fame election. Most players would be ecstatic, but Glavine looked stoic. Tell me, have any other players looked so unemotional upon receiving news of their HOF elections?

A: Actually, there have been several. Christy Mathewson was probably the first. Upon receiving news of his election with the inaugural HOF class of 1936, he had been dead for nearly 11 years.

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